Recently in Reviews
15 Jun 2011
Israel Opera’s summer festival grew astonishingly in the year following its 2010 inaugural season. »
14 Jun 2011
It would seem that in his preparations for this new production of Simon
Boccanegra, the acclaimed Russian director, Dmitri Tcherniakov, has been
familiarising himself Jonathan Miller’s previous ENO efforts. »
14 Jun 2011
Think verismo and one imagines melodramatic, often violent plots which peer unflinchingly into the soul of every character. »
12 Jun 2011
The current Tosca at the Royal Opera House is something of a classic, revived four times in five years. It’s now being filmed for cinema to be released in November 2011. »
09 Jun 2011
It was a lucky happenstance that glorious vocalism characterized Badisches
Staatstheater’s La Gioconda, for effective stagecraft was nowhere in evidence…but, oh, what singing!
»
09 Jun 2011
A capacity crowd at the Wigmore Hall eagerly awaited the arrival of Andreas Scholl and Tamar Halperin on the platform on Tuesday evening. »
07 Jun 2011
‘Glitter and be gay!’ cries Cunegonde, determined to overcome the bitter circumstances in which she finds herself in sordid, downturn Paris. »
06 Jun 2011
The U.S. premiere of Hans Werner Henze’s Phaedra at the Opera Company of Philadelphia may well be the most important and ambitious new work presented by any American company this season. »
03 Jun 2011
Since 2006, movie cineplexes across the USA have attracted a somewhat unlikely crowd for Saturday matinees, from fall to spring. »
01 Jun 2011
Any performance of Brahms and Schumann four part songs is an occasion. »
31 May 2011
Pilgrimages, I suspect, derive a degree of their fruitfulness from the slowness of the journey, a pace born of desire or necessity, that removes the journey from the quotidian, brings the purpose into greater focus, and allows for a richer savoring of the experience. »
31 May 2011
Before a single track has been heard, Jordi Savall’s The Forgotten Kingdom impresses with its scale: a three-CD set packaged in a lavish, bound book that contains fifty dense pages of English commentary by nine different authors; adding the multiple translations, beautiful illustrations, and song texts, the book itself luxuriantly sprawls over 500 pages. »
30 May 2011
“Music, music for a while/ Shall all your cares beguile,” vowed Ian Bostridge at the opening of this recital with his regular accompanist, Julius Drake. »
30 May 2011
This is the one by Giorgio Strehler that opened at Versailles in 1973 and since has endured twenty-three incarnations, first at the Garnier and later at the Bastille. »
27 May 2011
It’s easy to slip into platitudes when eulogising the last London
recital performance of a singer commonly lauded as the outstanding countertenor
of his generation. »
26 May 2011
Teatro Grattacielo gives concert performances of Verismo operas that range from the obscure to the unheard-of. »
26 May 2011
Phyllida Lloyd’s reading of Verdi’s Macbeth –
first seen in 2002 and here revived for the second time – could certainly
not be described as ‘subtle’, either dramatically or visually. »
24 May 2011
Glorious sunshine for Glyndebourne Opera’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg on the eve of Richard Wagner's birthday. »
23 May 2011
André-Modeste Grétry, the greatest opera composer ever to come from Belgium, made his way to Paris in 1767 at the age of 26. »
23 May 2011
On my travels, I often hear occasional opera-goers complain about having wasted time and money on a production that, on the night, bears no relation to their expectations. »
22 May 2011
This substantial book is one of the latest in the Ashgate series of
collected essays in opera studies and draws together articles from a disparate
group of scholarly journals and collected volumes, some recent, some now
difficult to locate. »
22 May 2011
The Washington National Opera has concluded its 2010-11 season with
Gluck’s 1779 masterpiece Iphigénie en Tauride, arguably the
great Viennese composer’s greatest achievement and his swan song (if one
does not count that unfortunate flop of 1780, Echo et Narcisse —
and luckily, one hardly ever does). »
22 May 2011
James MacMillan has reunited with his librettist, the poet Michael Symmons Roberts, to produce his new opera Clemency. »
21 May 2011
By Leporello’s count (in the “Catalogue aria”), Don
Giovanni tallies over 2,000 sexual exploits. »
21 May 2011
Philipp Stölzl’s production of Benvenuto Cellini, from the 2007 Salzburg Festival, is weird almost beyond belief. »
20 May 2011
Classic films often receive the honor of a full “restoration,” especially when a new viewing format appears. »
20 May 2011
A quarter century having passed since its premiere, Nixon in China appears to have secured a niche in the opera repertoire, at least of American opera houses. »
18 May 2011
Gluck’s Orfeo is, intentionally, free of clutter. If you cut
out the scenes of balletic rejoicing just before the finale (and I can’t
think of any good reason not to do so), it’s less than ninety minutes of
music. »
18 May 2011
There’s a lot to be said for lowered expectations. After last
fall’s cramped, over-busy staging of Das Rheingold, I was
prepared for a rough night at Die Walküre—and enjoyed the
occasion very much, the staging, the direction, most of the singing, even the
costumes. »
09 May 2011
Ariadne auf Naxos, the next major endeavor of the Richard Strauss/Hugo von Hofmannsthal collaboration after Der Rosenkavalier in 1911, has been a special challenge for American opera companies. »
09 May 2011
Terry Gilliam was one of the forces behind Monty Python, the popular British TV comedy of the 1970’s. His fans will flock in droves to his version of Berlioz’s The Damnation of Faust at the ENO, London. »
29 Apr 2011
For the second time in a matter of just a few weeks, the Wigmore Hall
audience were treated to an evening of seventeenth-century song and dance. »
29 Apr 2011
Rigoletto is the perfect opera. Even Verdi, who wrote so many
wonderful scores, never created anything more flawless. »
29 Apr 2011
Saturday, April 23 was indeed a rainy afternoon in New York City. »
24 Apr 2011
It has long been my belief that the problems of the planet would be resolved
(or move on to their next stage) if only the folk of every ethnicity (nation,
faith, historic minority, tribe) would devote their energy to creating
opera—and perhaps theater or dance—out of its musical and mythical
traditions. »
22 Apr 2011
It’s hard to go wrong with The Magic Flute. Mozart’s
final opera contains every audience-pleasing feature in spades: beautiful
music, a fairy tale story, romance, laughter, villains, heroes/heroines, and
for most — a happy ending. »
22 Apr 2011
There’s more Byron than Brontë in Bernard Herrmann’s 1951
Wuthering Heights. »
22 Apr 2011
By the time he emerged from retirement with Otello, his
twenty-seventh opera, at 73, there wasn’t much Giuseppe Verdi
didn’t know about how to make an orchestra do his bidding, set the mood
of each line of a good story, piling excitement on excitement and letting the
tension mutate to something gentler at the right times in order to make the
outburst to follow the more demoniac. »
22 Apr 2011
To enter into David DiChiera’s space as he talks opera shop is to risk
being pulled into his world, rapt by a tractor beam emitting a constant flow of
music theater load. »
22 Apr 2011
Trust Winnipeg’s resourceful Little Opera Company to come up with a little known, yet charmingly entertaining spring production. »
19 Apr 2011
In Lyric Opera of Chicago’s new production of Handel’s
Hercules there is an undeniable interpretive strategy which prompts
the viewer to consider recurring elements of human emotion, e.g. jealousy,
rage, pity, among others. »
19 Apr 2011
They all wrote songs — lots of them: Ives, Bernstein, Rorem. In recital, however, the American product has never found a place on the perch claimed by Schubert and Schumann. »
19 Apr 2011
The most remarkable aspects of this fresh, illuminating performance of
Schubert’s Winterreise by Ian Bostridge and Mitsuko Uchida were the masterly control of dramatic form and the insightful, quite original, shaping of emotional content. »
19 Apr 2011
The very name Mantovani strikes musical terror in the hearts of high minded Americans and Brits of a certain age. Now the same surname is evidently terrorizing Parisians. »
18 Apr 2011
In Russian-speaking countries, Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Tsar’s Bride is much loved. In the west, it’s known mainly for its Overture. The Royal Opera House’s production is the first major production of the full opera in Britain. »
14 Apr 2011
In Britain, Katarina Karnéus is closely associated with Grieg and Sibelius. Indeed, her career has almost been defined by her recordings of their songs for Hyperion. »
13 Apr 2011
In those dark days before VCR and DVD, knowledgeable film buffs craved the
return of Solaris and Stalker to a local art house screen. »
13 Apr 2011
A Frenchman, three Germans and a Venezuelan-born French national: musical responses to Venice. »
08 Apr 2011
“Show goes on despite fresh bomb scare”. Not exactly the sort of
headline a new opera company might have dreamt of for its inaugural production. »
06 Apr 2011
Richard Strauss, nearly eighty years old and past caring what anybody
thought (Pauline aside), ignored the Second World War happening just down the
street and collaborated with his longtime conductor Clemens Krauss in an arch
libretto about the feud for primacy between poetry and music, concluding with
their synthesis in opera. »
04 Apr 2011
New York City Opera’s evening of “Monodramas” (under that
general title) may not appeal to the opera-goer who prefers such typical fare as the company’s other offering this week, Donizetti’s L’Elisir d’amore, but I found it a devilish and delightful exploration of the depths of inner consciousness. »
04 Apr 2011
Donizetti described to his father the premiere cast of L’Elisir in terms of lukewarm praise—the tenor only “passable” the soprano’s voice “pretty” and the bass “a little hammy.” »
04 Apr 2011
In this intriguing and unpredictable recital, American countertenor, Lawrence Zazzo, and his accompanist, Simon Lepper, presented a dynamic sequence of American song from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. »
